PETALUMA, CA–Nov 27, 2012–Cyan today announced that Great Plains Communications will be lighting a new 615-mile fiber route using Cyan Z-Series packet-optical transport platforms (P-OTPs). The Omaha to Denver route, which includes numerous connection points in Nebraska and Colorado, will substantially expand the range of business applications Great Plains can address, especially in the rapidly growing data center interconnect market. Coupled with Blue Planet, Cyan’s recently announced software-defined network (SDN) system, Great Plains can rapidly and economically turn up new wavelength and Ethernet services for local businesses, data center operators, and cellular providers.

The new fiber route is anchored by redundant Cyan Z-Series P-OTPs able to deliver services with precisely engineered latency characteristics. Cyan’s Blue Planet software provides a set of design and operations apps that minimize costs for Great Plains and ensure SLA compliance. Blue Planet apps even allow Great Plains to offer its customers real-time visibility into the performance of their services.

According to John Greene, Chief Network Engineer at Great Plains, “The addition of this route to our fiber backbone is extremely important, especially for our data center customers with growing bandwidth and strict SLA requirements. Not only do we get needed redundancy within our Nebraska footprint, we also have the opportunity to offer our business customers connectivity to Denver at affordable rates. While the Cyan Z-Series gives us the capacity and flexibility we need, Blue Planet software is what really makes the difference. With Blue Planet we have a lot more confidence that what we design is what we will get and what our customers will actually experience.”

Added Cyan co-founder and CMO Eric Clelland, “Great Plains Communications is providing strategic bandwidth access alternatives to the heartland. With data centers being opened and expanded throughout the region, adding capacity to and between them becomes critical to furthering the growth of cloud-based applications and storage. Great Plains is staying ahead of the demand curve and better addressing the needs of its customers with this expansion.”

Great Plains has delivered state-of-the-art services to business and residential customers in rural Nebraska for over 100 years. The new route will be fully capable of delivering 100G wavelength services. Great Plains anticipates offering 100G services beginning in 2013.